The Tank Lords(5)

Most troopers kept their body armor near their bunks. Birdie didn't bother with that stuff anymore.

Despite the ringing alarm bell, there were people still standing around in the middle of the company area; but that was their problem, not Birdie Sparrow's.

He was diving feet-first through the hatch when the first mortar shell went off, hurling a figure away from its blast.

The body looked like DJ Bell waving goodbye.



When the third mortar shell went off, June Ranson rolled into a crouch and sprinted toward her combat car. The Consies used 100mm automatic mortars that fired from a three-round clip. It was a bloody good weapon—a lot like the mortar in Hammer's infantry platoons, and much more effective than the locally-made tube the National Army used.

The automatic mortar fired three shots fast, but the weight of a fresh clip stretched the gap between rounds three and four out longer than it would have been from a manually-loaded weapon.

Of course, if the Consies had a pair of mortars targeted on Ranson's detachment area, she was right outta luck.

Guns were firing throughout the encampment now, and the Yokels had finally switched on their warning klaxon. A machinegun sent a stream of bright-orange Consie tracers snapping through the air several meters above Ranson's head. One tracer hit a pebble in the earthen berm and ricocheted upward at a crazy angle.

A strip charge wheezed in the night, a nasty, intermittent sound like a cat throwing up. A drive rocket was uncoiling the charge through the wire and minefields on which the Yokels depended for protection.

The charge went off, hammering the ground and blasting a corridor through the defenses. It ignited the western sky with a momentary red flash like the sunset's afterthought.

Ranson caught the rear hand-hold of her combat car, Warmonger—Tootsie One-three—and swung herself into the fighting compartment. The fans were live, and both wing guns were firing.

Beside the vehicle were the scattered beginnings of an evening meal: a catalytic cooker, open ration packets, and three bottles of local beer spilled to stain the dust. Warmonger's crew had been together for better than two years. They did everything as a team, so Ranson could be nearly certain her command vehicle would be up to speed in an emergency.

She was odd man out: apart from necessary business, the crewmen hadn't addressed a dozen words to her in the month and a half since she took over the detachment.

Ranson didn't much care. She'd seen too many people die herself to want to get to know any others closely.

Hot plastic empties ejecting from Stolley's left-wing gun spattered over her. One of the half-molten disks clung to the hair on the back of her wrist for long enough to burn.

Ranson grabbed her helmet, slapped the visor down over her face, and thumbed it from optical to thermal so that she could see details again. That dickheaded Yokel reporter had picked a great time to blind her with his camera light. . . .

A mortar shell burst; then everything paused at the overwhelming crash of a tank's main gun. At least one of the panzers sent to Camp Progress for maintenance was up and running.

Figures, fuzzy and a bilious yellow-green, leaped from concealment less than a hundred meters from the berm. Two of them intersected the vivid thermal track of Stolley's tribarrel. The third flopped down and disappeared as suddenly as he'd risen.

A cubical multi-function display, only thirty centimeters on a side and still an awkward addition to the clutter filling the blower's fighting compartment, was mounted on the front bulkhead next to Ranson's tribarrel. She switched it on and picked up her back-and-breast armor.

"Janacek!" She ordered her right gunner over the pulsing thump-hiss of the tribarrels to either side of her. "Help me on!"

The stocky, spike-haired crewman turned from the spade grips of his gun and took the weight of Ranson's ceramic armor. She shrugged into the clamshell and latched it down her right side.

All six blowers in the guard detachment were beads of light in the multi-function display. Their fusion bottles were pressurized, though that didn't mean they had full crews.

"Now your own!" she said, handing the compartment's other suit to Janacek.

"Screw it!" the gunner snarled as he turned to his tribarrel.

"Now, trooper!" Ranson shouted in his ear.

Janacek swore and took the armor.

Two bullets clanged against the underside of the splinter shield, a steel plate a meter above the coaming of the fighting compartment. One of the Consie rounds howled off across the encampment while the other disintegrated in red sparks that prickled all three of the Slammers.

Stolley triggered a long burst, then a single round. "My trick, sucker!" he shouted.

The air was queasy with the bolts' ionized tracks and the sullen, petrochemical stink of the empty cases.